This patent document relates to photonic devices and techniques.
Photonic components, interconnects, devices and modules can be used to use modulated light for carrying and transferring information with a broad bandwidth and at a high speed in data communications. It is desirable in various applications to integrate electronic circuits such as microprocessors and other integrated processing circuits together with photonic interconnects and devices to provide high performance information processing and broadband communications between different circuits or processors, including using high speed photonic interconnects (e.g., optical waveguides) to interconnect different circuits or processors. As a specific example, advances in silicon and silicon-compatible photonics have spurred intense research in the area of optical interconnects for increasing the bandwidth and lowering the power of computing systems such as multi- and many-core processors.
Various technical challenges exist in integrating electronic circuits, photonic or optical components together, including limited real estate on semiconductor substrates for integrating electronic components/devices and photonic components/devices, certain incompatibility between processing in fabrication of electronics and processing for fabrication of photonics and interconnect issues between electronics and photonic devices.